I see your point. I think that a lot of the cheating can be resolved by sending packets to an average of 1.2 people and comparing checksummed results.
I'd also be curious to see if there is a technique by which pairs of packets, to be sent to different places, could be trivially checksummed together in such a way that the SETI@Home'd results of each packet could be trivially checksummed together and compared to the earlier value, but that neither site could "fake" their own result without either knowing the other packet's initial value or going ahead and running the full SETI transform. Kind of a paired-key cryptography thing. I wish Applied Cryptography hadn't given me such a headache, or I might know whether I was talking out my ear...
1. Seti can hardly be convinced to open-source the client until they have means of verifying the blocks they receive.
But they can sure as anything verify the blocks they've sent, and if they get a report of a hit, they can verify it themselves using a reference implementation, or quietly submit it to someone else and see if they get the same results. I'm thinking that if they make a point of being the One True Source of Source code, and reviewing submitted patches and integrating them themselves, much potential trouble will be eliminated.
Open-sourcing has the further advantage of becoming very, very portable, almost for free. I'm sure there are a few bored mainframers out there with a few underutilized MVS boxen that could contribute to the Cause.
<troll>But all of us know the real reason they won't publish the source--SETI@Home isn't sending us space noise at all; they're sending us heavily-encrypted high-level diplomatic radio transmissions from all over the world, letting us do the CIA / NSA / NRO's dirty work for them. Until we see the source, they can't prove it's false; therefore we must assume it's true until we see the source.</troll>.
Has anybody seen the latest DNRC office prank? Someone's co-worker was running SETI@Home on their office PC, so the DNRCie hacked him a screen saver that beeped and kept flashing the words SETI@Home: Possible extraterrestrial transmission found. Confidence 99.9893% over and over again. I can think of a half dozen people I'd like to do this to, only I'd make damned sure that on the next user input event, they'd get a dialogue saying "Please stand by: writing results to disk. DO NOT INTERRUPT THIS PROCESS" followed two seconds later by a dialogue box saying "Fatal exception error", because there's no point in being just a little bit cruel.
That second URL's Trace Diagram feature is great. Its "trace diagram" feature finally made it clear to me how Enigma-style rotor-plus-reflector cyphers work. Thank you for posting it.
I saw the special last night, and found it very well put together for the mathematically lightweight.
As with today, most of the big breaks in cryptography came from sloppily handled transmissions and misuse of protocols. For example:
The default plugboard layout on Enigma maps a=a, b=b, etc. This key insight greatly simplified the initial work the Poles did in describing the three-rotor machine.
In the first year or so of the war, the three-letter "session key"--as it were--was sent twice in a row at the start of each session, greatly simplifying cracking.
Stock phrases such as a big, happy "Heil Hitler" at the beginning or end of a message allowed known-plaintext attacks.
Operators who were in a big hurry would sometimes skip the critical setup step of giving the rotors a quick spin before the session. This meant that the session-key would be the same as the daily key, dramatically reducing the number of possible encypherments.
Operators would use personal stock-phrases for their session keys; for example, if the first session used the key "B-E-R", the second would use "L-I-N". Recognizing operators was fairly easy--the style or "fist" of one's Morse code transmissions is often as distinctive as one's handwriting.
The Lorentz machine--a fourteen rotor (I think) modulo-arithmetic cypher--was reverse-engineered when a sender made a critical mistake: After sending a four-thousand character message, the receiver said, "I'm sorry, would you resend that?" So, using the same initial settings, he resent the message, but this time, he impatiently started using abbreviations, allowing Bletchley Park to do a differential-plaintext attack to see the character stream generated by the rotors, and from there determine how they worked.
Once Lorentz was broken, though, it still took a month to decypher a single message, by which time it was essentially useless. Once Flowers's Colossus machines went on-line, a message could be broken in minutes or hours.
On the whole, it was a fascinating special, bringing together numerous sources ranging from mathematicians to code-clerks to modern-day cryptanalysts to tell the story of how Allied Intelligence greatly reduced the length and cost of World War II in Europe.
You forgot the inevitable Slug-Eating Robots for Dummies book and the speculation as to how to make them into a Beowulf cluster.
There have been some interesting recent experiments in cooperative robotics; maybe extending the slug-eater model to incorporate slug-herders and zone-quartering isn't such a bad idea...
Um, perhaps instead of reading "sophisticated proprietary (device drivers)" you should read "sophisticated (proprietary device)" drivers? Changes the meaning substantially.
This can be interpreted three ways:
They have drivers for "proprietary" devices like SoundBlaster(tm) cards,
They have proprietary drivers for SoundBlaster cards, or
A marketroid wrote it.
In case one, they're just using drivers out of the community and/or sourcing drivers back to the community. In case three, all bets are off because market-speak and reality don't have to correlate. In case two, they're keeping driver source to themselves, which may be for one of two reasons: either they're stupid, or they're using technology licensed to them under an NDA and they're trying to make the most of an otherwise crummy situation. In that case, I'll just go ahead and be glad the driver is there at all and work on opening it up/reverse engineering it later.
Because the next step is a roachbot and a ratbot. And like any other technofrob the price will likely plummet once production bugs are ironed out and high-volume manufacturing becomes possible.
You should to Seattle some time. They've got slugs there the size of your forearm. I have no doubt that BillG could afford a few of these for his garden.
I was born 1969.02.02; making me about eleven months older than Linus. I think that this is the first sign that you're getting old: that people younger than you are going out and changing the world. It's depressing to realize that changing the world is something that just ain't gonna happen for me.
Never mind that Einstein did his greatest work before he was 25; never mind that Woz and Jobs and Gates founded their companies in their early twenties. Linus is my contemporary. So I'm jealous and I'm depressed. How petty of me.
Just on a side note, I find that most people who don't believe in intellectual property rights don't really contribute much in the way of intellectual property to the world.
This is probably true for the same reason that rich white people are more likely to be Republicans.
Copyright law, patent law, and trademark protections do indeed have valid reasons for existing, but like any other legal constructs, they can be abused and misapplied by the unscrupulous few to the detriment of the many. Compare an open-source religion like Buddhism with a closed-source one like Scientology. Look at software patents. And aren't you glad that penicillin and the polio vaccines were developed by researchers working for public health and universities instead of by pharmaceutical companies with intellectual property rights to enforce worldwide?
Refusing to give a record company $15 so they can give the artist $0.70 doesn't make me feel $15 worth of guilty. In fact, I'd prefer a bootleg Credence Clearwater Revival album to one bought from the label.
I've bought--rather than stolen--every single piece of music I've acquired since I left school, because I believe that since I can, I have an obligation to the artist. This is called patronage; I do it because I should and I can. I will not toe some record company line that says I must deprive music from those who can't.
And at the same time, I really like being paid to write. I really look forward to quitting my day job and being creative for a living. But I don't like the idea of being one of those assholes who sues every well-meaning grandmother who sends photocopied child-rearing advice to their children.
Okay. I'm going to take a deep breath now and get back to work.
Well, it's not technology in general; it's television and before that the light bulb. The light bulb made it so you could do things after it got dark outside that otherwise had to be done during daylight hours, like read and knit and clean house. Long time ago it got dark and you went to bed, couldn't sleep, nudged each other, did it, and had babies.
Television made it even worse: now we have something that keeps us amused with very little effort--you don't even have to turn the page. The moving pictures stimulate your brain until it's exhausted and you have to go to sleep. Cable television is even worse.
The whole problem comes down to the things people do to alleviate their boredom: If you have an Internet and a television and a VCR and books to read, you surf and stare and rewind and read; if you have an S.O., you diddle. Here's a short play, set in California:
Him: I'm bored. What do you want to do? Her: Let's rent a movie. Him: Okay.
Here's another one, set in the middle of Africa:
Him: I'm bored. What do you want to do? Her: Let's have sex. Him: Okay.
So that explains the slowing population growth in countries that have "arrived." The reason population has exploded elsewhere is essentially first-world altruism: we (being the rich world) gave them (being the poor world) antibiotics and vaccinations, but we forgot to give them televisions. So they still have sex and still have eleven babies per couple, but instead of eight of them dying, only one or two die. If you want to control the world population explosion and avoid a Malthusian crisis, instead of giving third world countries rubbers, we should be giving them VH1.
I think that the "rationalization" is at least in part valid. Theft has two components to it: the thief causing herself to have something that belongs to someone else, and the thief depriving the owner of something they rightfully own.
In the case of data theft (in this case, the taking of music created by someone else), although the first component clearly exists (thereby making it something a lawyer can call theft), the second may or may not. Ater does raise an interesting point: if you are not depriving the original owner of anything, have you stolen from them? Lawyers representing the interests of IP publishers say yes, of course, and for the most part case law supports them. However, if you are depriving the IP's creator of nothing other than a payment, and if given the choice between paying for the IP and completely doing without the IP, you'd do without it, I think things get a bit more nebulous from an ethical perspective, though not a legal one.
And don't go saying things like "if it weren't for the money, nobody would create art." I'm sure Linus Torvalds etc. would disagree.
Put a drop of your own blood on a postcard, let it dry, write "prior work" and your date of birth (or conception, if that's the sort of question you can ask your parents) underneath it, and mail it to them.
There is no profiling tool that can predict with one hundred percent accuracy;
there will be a great many false positives;
there will be a great many false negatives;
likelihood of violence will be expressed as a percentage.
My biggest concern is that the misuse of this "profiling" tool is almost inevitable. So here's a long list of questions:
Where's the threshold percentage where they remove the kid from the general population? Is this new special population going to consist primarily of potentially violent kids? By providing a strong-identity peer group, will peer pressure reenforce or aggravate preexisting violent tendencies?
Among the potential threats placed in the special population, what percentage of them would never have gone on to commit any act of violence? Of this non-violent group, what percentage of them will be victimized by their new population? How many of them will become violent?
Where's the threshold percentage where instead of removing the kid from the general population, they start treating him or her differently? What will be the effect of this additional scrutiny, stigmatization and alienation?
If children rated an eight are automatically removed from the general population, and a child rated a six subsequently commits an act of violence, will the school district react to the inevitable lawsuit by lowering the automatic-removal threshold to seven? Among those sevens, what percentage of them would never have committed a violent act without further exposure to a more potentially sociopathic peer group?
When will violence potential scale scores become part of a child's permanent transcript, available to any future college admissions board or employer? How many potentially violent yet non-violent persons will denied quality higher education or worthwhile employment as a result of this profiling? Of these persons, what percentage of them will become violent as a result of social and economic hardships imposed on them during their adult lives due to opportunities denied them as a result of their profile?
Will insurance companies ever deny health insurance to potentially violent persons?
Will insurance companies ever force employers to pay higher rates in group-health or liability insurance if they hire or attempt to hire a high-scale person?
Ah well. It all just bothers me, is all. I don't like the idea of adding additional social pressure and alientation to an already high-pressure, alienated society.
Incidentally, last quarter's issue of Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict & World Order had a fascinating article on the abuse of preemptive incarceration as applied to the mentally ill and otherwise potentially violent.
Disclaimer: in high school, I drank, smoked, did drugs, went to unsupervised parties, drove fast, listened to the Dead Kennedies, mouthed off to stupid teachers, wore either a trench coat or a battered old army jacket, kept a baseball bat in my car, often had a firearm in my car at school, and nearly always had a double edged fighting knife sheathed in my boot.
Remember that IP with a number larger than 255 in it in 'The Net'?
Maybe they were trying to originate a 555-xxxx type standard--in the U.S., any phone number 555-xxxx redirects to information or to a phone company equivalent of/dev/null, so they use that in movies all the time. A better idea would have been 192.168.x.x, but what do I know?
On the whole, every movie I've seen which features some sort of "specialist" stuff gets it wrong for the sake of audience comprehension. Take even a movie like Silence of the Lambs: Lecter was described as a "pure psychopath," where in fact he was a sociopath. But since hardly anybody knows what a sociopath is, they said "psychopath" instead. (In the most famous line in the film, Lecter says "I ate his liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti." As any good oenophile knows, there is no such thing as a nice Chianti.)
Anyone who has ever shot a pistol will cringe to see the gun-handling in a movie (especially that sideways-grip thing. WTF is that about?). Sailors regularly gag to see an exterior shot of a sailboat heeling over, then cut to a cabin interior where everybody is standing upright. Airline pilots laugh their asses off at things like Airport '77, and I'm sure there isn't a lawyer alive that doesn't want to smack Calista Flockhart, but who doesn't?
A mathematician friend I watched Good Will Hunting with told me the equation Will and the professor solved together on the chalkboard was an elementary problem in combinatorial mathematics, but it sure fooled me, and easily 99% of the rest of the audience. The point is, the price you pay for expertise an any given field is being able to see past all the popular misconceptions. Since the goal of most movies is to establish a rapport with the audience, they often have to resort to oversimplifications or inaccuracies in their technical details. They need to dupe the great majority of the audience, but hopefully they will not be so sloppy as to disgust the rest of us. Sometimes those details get in the way of the storytelling; The Abyss would have been downright unwatchable if everyone spoke in the Alvin the Chipmunk falsetto a helium atmosphere causes--I gladly let that one slide. And would anybody here refuse to watch "Star Wars" because you can hear the explosions?
I just wish I could go. I live in Atlanta, close enough to bike to the thing, but alas, a family wedding is dragging me out of town this weekend. I was so looking forward to doing a GWG here...
The smart dust page had a link to a page with some really snazzy micro aircraft. Can you imagine using dust sensors/controllers to build a tiny self-guiding spy plane that can provide 20 minutes of flight time?
Mr. Katz, while I agree with your thesis that America is a lot less free than it promotes itself as being, I don't believe the examples you used demonstrate this. Disagreeing with someone is not censorship. Yelling back is not censorship. Screaming with rage because you find someone's ideas offensive is not censorship. However, supressing the disagreement, quieting the yellers-back, and ticketing the screamers is censorship.
The right of one person to express an idea in now way obligates me to respect that idea, agree with it, or consent to it with my silence.
I don't have a problem with the Brooklyn Museum's current exhibit. I don't have a problem with Giuliani calling it "sick". I do have a problem with Rudy's witholding of funds--particularly his egregious claim that he's witholding the funds because the museum is charging admission to a public building. Still, there remains a deeper question of what obligation the state has to spend money taken by force from its citizens on art, which leads to one of those nasty all-or-nothing propositions that surround the use of "discretionary" funding of any sort.
I don't have a problem with people calling Professor Singer a monster. They have a right to do so; denying them the right is censorship. I don't approve of death threats, naturally: the threat to murder is tantamount to coercion and should be treated accordingly.
But I don't have a problem with the Reform Party calling for Ventura to leave the party, nor with the Republican Party asking Buchanan to leave. Those parties have every right to expect their members to be committed to a particular code of conduct and political agenda. That's not censorship in any sense of the word, because, as you circuitously mentioned, they have other means of expressing their ideas.
And when the craft hits sea-level atmosphere at 11.3km/s, will it turn into a white-hot mist immediately, or will it leave a trail like a hypersonic bottle rocket? How much pressure will the nose cone have to endure at that velocity/pressure? And for how many km in which directions will all life be destroyed by the shock wave? If the launch is near the sea, how well will the ocean propagate the shock wave at lethal intensities?
No, 600MPH is probably a good speed to get to; you don't want something with that big a cross-section reaching Mach 1 that close to the ground. OTOH, them rocket motors probably make a whole lot more noise than the boom ever could...
The faraday cage goes around the carrier/track, not the plane itself. 'Sides, the plane's skin, if it's made of metal, probably serves as a fairly good cage itself. No earthing needed; if it is, well, the plane is attached to the carrier until takeoff velocity anyway.
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I'd also be curious to see if there is a technique by which pairs of packets, to be sent to different places, could be trivially checksummed together in such a way that the SETI@Home'd results of each packet could be trivially checksummed together and compared to the earlier value, but that neither site could "fake" their own result without either knowing the other packet's initial value or going ahead and running the full SETI transform. Kind of a paired-key cryptography thing. I wish Applied Cryptography hadn't given me such a headache, or I might know whether I was talking out my ear...
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Open-sourcing has the further advantage of becoming very, very portable, almost for free. I'm sure there are a few bored mainframers out there with a few underutilized MVS boxen that could contribute to the Cause.
<troll>But all of us know the real reason they won't publish the source--SETI@Home isn't sending us space noise at all; they're sending us heavily-encrypted high-level diplomatic radio transmissions from all over the world, letting us do the CIA / NSA / NRO's dirty work for them. Until we see the source, they can't prove it's false; therefore we must assume it's true until we see the source.</troll>.
Has anybody seen the latest DNRC office prank? Someone's co-worker was running SETI@Home on their office PC, so the DNRCie hacked him a screen saver that beeped and kept flashing the words SETI@Home: Possible extraterrestrial transmission found. Confidence 99.9893% over and over again. I can think of a half dozen people I'd like to do this to, only I'd make damned sure that on the next user input event, they'd get a dialogue saying "Please stand by: writing results to disk. DO NOT INTERRUPT THIS PROCESS" followed two seconds later by a dialogue box saying "Fatal exception error", because there's no point in being just a little bit cruel.
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I saw the special last night, and found it very well put together for the mathematically lightweight.
As with today, most of the big breaks in cryptography came from sloppily handled transmissions and misuse of protocols. For example:
Once Lorentz was broken, though, it still took a month to decypher a single message, by which time it was essentially useless. Once Flowers's Colossus machines went on-line, a message could be broken in minutes or hours.
On the whole, it was a fascinating special, bringing together numerous sources ranging from mathematicians to code-clerks to modern-day cryptanalysts to tell the story of how Allied Intelligence greatly reduced the length and cost of World War II in Europe.
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There have been some interesting recent experiments in cooperative robotics; maybe extending the slug-eater model to incorporate slug-herders and zone-quartering isn't such a bad idea...
--
This can be interpreted three ways:
In case one, they're just using drivers out of the community and/or sourcing drivers back to the community. In case three, all bets are off because market-speak and reality don't have to correlate. In case two, they're keeping driver source to themselves, which may be for one of two reasons: either they're stupid, or they're using technology licensed to them under an NDA and they're trying to make the most of an otherwise crummy situation. In that case, I'll just go ahead and be glad the driver is there at all and work on opening it up/reverse engineering it later.
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You should to Seattle some time. They've got slugs there the size of your forearm. I have no doubt that BillG could afford a few of these for his garden.
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My dog did, too. One night in high school I had a hard time explaining to Mom why the dog was tripping over everything in the yard and singing.
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This was a very astute assessment, AC. Thank you.
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bugger!
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All companies do this sort of thing. Every fourth quarter, the RBOC I contract at has a great number of annual charges come due, because in their effort to keep "shareholder value" high throughout the year, they put the charges off until 4Q. So every fourth quarter, they go through a panicky round of early retirements, project suspensions, raise postponements, and contractor layoffs. This last is part of the reason VBCs love contractors--they can drop them at a whim without calling it a layoff. MS's financial games are nothing new, to them or to business at large. A little while ago, they started counting their software products as an asset (which they had never done before), which meant that the bottom line on their financial report was higher than ever, and that's the only line the bozos at CNBC ever read on the air anyway. MS still has plenty of things they can do to keep looking insanely rich on the books. The problem, though, is that even dealing from the bottom of the deck, sooner or later you're going to run out of cards. Robert Cringely wrote in interesting article about this sort of thing. He quotes former MS CFO Frank Gaudette: "Watch for any changes in our accounting," said Gaudette. "If I need to, I can start depreciating the software and maintain earnings growth for years on flat revenue. Watch for the accounting changes, wait for the next uptick in the stock price, and then sell." Gaudette's advice is good about any company, but it's tricky to apply to tech companies, which have been cooking their books one way or another since their IPOs. Who knew that accounting held so many opportunities for creativity? And this "Investment Advisor"'s allegations are nothing new, either. Most likely, he's a shill for someone drumming up support for a class-action lawsuit. Back in the mid-1990s, Intel put up with this crap all the time--every quarter, this one particular lawyer would file a class-action lawsuit against Intel on behalf of its shareholders, alleging investor fraud, on the grounds that Intel only made seven and a half billion in profits that quarter instead of the projected seven and three-quarters billion. The whole tech-stock phenomenon is quite perverse--Amazon still sells fewer books than Barnes and Noble, and they're hemorrhaging money at a rate that would make Xerox go tits-up, yet they are worth more than the rest of the U.S. publishing industry combined. I have a nagging feeling that within two years this bubble is going to burst spectacularly, and Clinton's successor will be left holding the bag.
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Never mind that Einstein did his greatest work before he was 25; never mind that Woz and Jobs and Gates founded their companies in their early twenties. Linus is my contemporary. So I'm jealous and I'm depressed. How petty of me.
Screw it--I'm gonna go buy a motorcycle.
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Copyright law, patent law, and trademark protections do indeed have valid reasons for existing, but like any other legal constructs, they can be abused and misapplied by the unscrupulous few to the detriment of the many. Compare an open-source religion like Buddhism with a closed-source one like Scientology. Look at software patents. And aren't you glad that penicillin and the polio vaccines were developed by researchers working for public health and universities instead of by pharmaceutical companies with intellectual property rights to enforce worldwide?
Refusing to give a record company $15 so they can give the artist $0.70 doesn't make me feel $15 worth of guilty. In fact, I'd prefer a bootleg Credence Clearwater Revival album to one bought from the label.
I've bought--rather than stolen--every single piece of music I've acquired since I left school, because I believe that since I can, I have an obligation to the artist. This is called patronage; I do it because I should and I can. I will not toe some record company line that says I must deprive music from those who can't.
And at the same time, I really like being paid to write. I really look forward to quitting my day job and being creative for a living. But I don't like the idea of being one of those assholes who sues every well-meaning grandmother who sends photocopied child-rearing advice to their children.
Okay. I'm going to take a deep breath now and get back to work.
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Television made it even worse: now we have something that keeps us amused with very little effort--you don't even have to turn the page. The moving pictures stimulate your brain until it's exhausted and you have to go to sleep. Cable television is even worse.
The whole problem comes down to the things people do to alleviate their boredom: If you have an Internet and a television and a VCR and books to read, you surf and stare and rewind and read; if you have an S.O., you diddle. Here's a short play, set in California:
Here's another one, set in the middle of Africa:
So that explains the slowing population growth in countries that have "arrived." The reason population has exploded elsewhere is essentially first-world altruism: we (being the rich world) gave them (being the poor world) antibiotics and vaccinations, but we forgot to give them televisions. So they still have sex and still have eleven babies per couple, but instead of eight of them dying, only one or two die. If you want to control the world population explosion and avoid a Malthusian crisis, instead of giving third world countries rubbers, we should be giving them VH1.
Disclaimer: I am a crackpot.
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In the case of data theft (in this case, the taking of music created by someone else), although the first component clearly exists (thereby making it something a lawyer can call theft), the second may or may not. Ater does raise an interesting point: if you are not depriving the original owner of anything, have you stolen from them? Lawyers representing the interests of IP publishers say yes, of course, and for the most part case law supports them. However, if you are depriving the IP's creator of nothing other than a payment, and if given the choice between paying for the IP and completely doing without the IP, you'd do without it, I think things get a bit more nebulous from an ethical perspective, though not a legal one.
And don't go saying things like "if it weren't for the money, nobody would create art." I'm sure Linus Torvalds etc. would disagree.
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Put a drop of your own blood on a postcard, let it dry, write "prior work" and your date of birth (or conception, if that's the sort of question you can ask your parents) underneath it, and mail it to them.
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My biggest concern is that the misuse of this "profiling" tool is almost inevitable. So here's a long list of questions:
Ah well. It all just bothers me, is all. I don't like the idea of adding additional social pressure and alientation to an already high-pressure, alienated society.
Incidentally, last quarter's issue of Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict & World Order had a fascinating article on the abuse of preemptive incarceration as applied to the mentally ill and otherwise potentially violent.
Disclaimer: in high school, I drank, smoked, did drugs, went to unsupervised parties, drove fast, listened to the Dead Kennedies, mouthed off to stupid teachers, wore either a trench coat or a battered old army jacket, kept a baseball bat in my car, often had a firearm in my car at school, and nearly always had a double edged fighting knife sheathed in my boot.
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If American Standard paid out the kind of product placement dollars that Apple did, I'm sure you'd see lots more pee scenes.
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On the whole, every movie I've seen which features some sort of "specialist" stuff gets it wrong for the sake of audience comprehension. Take even a movie like Silence of the Lambs: Lecter was described as a "pure psychopath," where in fact he was a sociopath. But since hardly anybody knows what a sociopath is, they said "psychopath" instead. (In the most famous line in the film, Lecter says "I ate his liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti." As any good oenophile knows, there is no such thing as a nice Chianti.)
Anyone who has ever shot a pistol will cringe to see the gun-handling in a movie (especially that sideways-grip thing. WTF is that about?). Sailors regularly gag to see an exterior shot of a sailboat heeling over, then cut to a cabin interior where everybody is standing upright. Airline pilots laugh their asses off at things like Airport '77, and I'm sure there isn't a lawyer alive that doesn't want to smack Calista Flockhart, but who doesn't?
A mathematician friend I watched Good Will Hunting with told me the equation Will and the professor solved together on the chalkboard was an elementary problem in combinatorial mathematics, but it sure fooled me, and easily 99% of the rest of the audience. The point is, the price you pay for expertise an any given field is being able to see past all the popular misconceptions. Since the goal of most movies is to establish a rapport with the audience, they often have to resort to oversimplifications or inaccuracies in their technical details. They need to dupe the great majority of the audience, but hopefully they will not be so sloppy as to disgust the rest of us. Sometimes those details get in the way of the storytelling; The Abyss would have been downright unwatchable if everyone spoke in the Alvin the Chipmunk falsetto a helium atmosphere causes--I gladly let that one slide. And would anybody here refuse to watch "Star Wars" because you can hear the explosions?
--
I just wish I could go. I live in Atlanta, close enough to bike to the thing, but alas, a family wedding is dragging me out of town this weekend. I was so looking forward to doing a GWG here...
--
The smart dust page had a link to a page with some really snazzy micro aircraft. Can you imagine using dust sensors/controllers to build a tiny self-guiding spy plane that can provide 20 minutes of flight time?
--
The right of one person to express an idea in now way obligates me to respect that idea, agree with it, or consent to it with my silence.
I don't have a problem with the Brooklyn Museum's current exhibit. I don't have a problem with Giuliani calling it "sick". I do have a problem with Rudy's witholding of funds--particularly his egregious claim that he's witholding the funds because the museum is charging admission to a public building. Still, there remains a deeper question of what obligation the state has to spend money taken by force from its citizens on art, which leads to one of those nasty all-or-nothing propositions that surround the use of "discretionary" funding of any sort.
I don't have a problem with people calling Professor Singer a monster. They have a right to do so; denying them the right is censorship. I don't approve of death threats, naturally: the threat to murder is tantamount to coercion and should be treated accordingly.
But I don't have a problem with the Reform Party calling for Ventura to leave the party, nor with the Republican Party asking Buchanan to leave. Those parties have every right to expect their members to be committed to a particular code of conduct and political agenda. That's not censorship in any sense of the word, because, as you circuitously mentioned, they have other means of expressing their ideas.
--
And when the craft hits sea-level atmosphere at 11.3km/s, will it turn into a white-hot mist immediately, or will it leave a trail like a hypersonic bottle rocket? How much pressure will the nose cone have to endure at that velocity/pressure? And for how many km in which directions will all life be destroyed by the shock wave? If the launch is near the sea, how well will the ocean propagate the shock wave at lethal intensities?
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Yeah, but the problem is that every time the blood rushes to that one, the other one quits working at all...
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No, 600MPH is probably a good speed to get to; you don't want something with that big a cross-section reaching Mach 1 that close to the ground. OTOH, them rocket motors probably make a whole lot more noise than the boom ever could...
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The faraday cage goes around the carrier/track, not the plane itself. 'Sides, the plane's skin, if it's made of metal, probably serves as a fairly good cage itself. No earthing needed; if it is, well, the plane is attached to the carrier until takeoff velocity anyway.
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